I use TillerHQ daily. I use the base sheets, but I’ve customized them with my own sheets, leveraging my Excel/Sheets knowledge to build the dashboards and drilldowns I want. I’ve been doing this through Tiller for a few years.
At work, we’re being encouraged to lean into AI tools, and I have to say that my eyes are opening to some serious applications in personal finance. So I wanted to throw this out to the group: consider preparing your data for more advanced tooling.
I see a future not just for summarizing data, but for making decisions and recommendations. The smart tools are going to want more than just numbers. They’ll want meaning.
So I’m making some changes in my sheets
Starting this month, every transaction I enter includes a new field: context. It’s a column I added to my Tiller Transactions sheet. Just a plain word or phrase that answers the question: why did I spend this?
Examples:
-
Grocery run:
weekly groceries plus items for BBQ Saturday -
Lunch with a friend:
non-work lunch with Phil -
Business expense:
Business flight to Vegas for Fal.CON. Company will reimburse me. -
Late night therapy:
I pre-bought Borderlands 4. Hope it is worth it.
This isn’t for sorting categories or budget alerts. It’s for future use. I want the data to already be there when AI tools get smart enough to start asking better questions.
Right now, most apps and reports say things like “You spent $200 on dining this month.” That’s fine. But eventually I want something smarter, like “Half of that dining spend was work-related. Your personal dining is down 20% since last month. Want to adjust your forecast?”
That only works if the data is ready. So I’m preparing it now.
I have never made any column additions in the Transactions sheet, but if I understand it right, we can. So I added a column at the end of the Transactions, and started tagging transactions with context in my own voice. That’s it.
No one’s paying me to say this. I just see what’s coming, and I don’t want to be caught sorting receipts when everyone else is running agent-based finance automations.
If you’re doing anything similar, I’d like to hear about it.